Charcuterie

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Chef Curtis Stone is a strange beast, having gone about this tumbling series of career goals backwards. He got TV famous before he had a high profile chef job; the endorsement deals and cookbooks happened years ahead of his first restaurant. His training and culinary pedigree is legit, involving Michelin-starred restaurants and iconic chefs as mentors, but he’s spent most of his career following the celebrity chef path rather than the working chef path. But damn it, that drive to prove himself wouldn’t let go. Now, ambition has struck again and propelled Stone to open a new Hollywood restaurant.

Gwen is an establishment that is striving for greatness in so many ways it’s a little head-spinning. It’s a meat importer, a butcher shop, a cocktail bar, a chophouse of sorts, and a return to serious glitzy Hollywood dining the likes of which we haven’t seen in decades.

The Cannibal Beer & Butcher — the newish Culver City outpost of the popular New York City restaurant and butcher shop — puts an emphasis on meat, a movement shared by a growing number of restaurants eschewing the vegetable-centric cooking commonly associated with L.A. in favor of something more primal. It is a small butcher shop that sells sandwiches during the day and a larger, cavelike restaurant next door that comes to life in the evening. The restaurant, headed by chef Francis Derby, is named for a celebrated racing cyclist, but the more obvious definition might fit, too: Dinner at the Cannibal will almost certainly involve some type of flesh (though probably not human). Read L.A. Weekly's full review here.